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Saturday, December 26, 2015

Porter Ranch, CA — Methane gas continues spewing, unchecked, into the air over southern California from a fractured well to an underground storage site — at such an alarming rate that low-flying planes have necessarily been diverted by the FAA, lest internal combustion engines meet highly volatile gas and, well, blow the entire area to hell.

This is, indeed, the biggest environmental catastrophe since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; and for now, there is no way to stop it.

This methane disaster is worse than can be sufficiently described in words, because while it’s estimated well over 100,000 pounds of methane spew into the atmosphere every hour, the leak can’t be halted, at least until spring. Even then, that stoppage depends entirely on the efficacy of a proposed fix — which remains a dubiously open question.

According to the California Air Resources Board, methane — a greenhouse gas 72 times more impactful in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide — has been escaping from the Aliso Canyon site with force equivalent “to a volcanic eruption” for about two months now. So far, the total leaked gas measures somewhere around 100,000 tons — adding “approximately one-quarter to the regular statewide methane emissions” during that same time frame.

“The relative magnitude of emissions from the leak compared to other sources of methane in the State underscores the urgency of stopping the gas leak. This comes on top of any problems caused by odor and any potential impacts from exposure,” states the initial report on the Aliso leak by air quality officials.

“The enormity of the Aliso Canyon gas leak cannot be overstated. Gas is escaping through a ruptured pipe more than 8,000 feet underground, and it shows no signs of stopping. As the pressure from the weight on top of the pipe causes the gas to diffuse, it only continues to dissipate across a wider and wider area,”explained Erin Brockovich, who spent time in nearby Porter Ranch investigating the leak.

Officials and experts are concerned, and they can’t recall another leak of this magnitude in decades — if ever. “I asked this question of our staff of 30 years,” said Steve Bohlen, who recently left his position as state supervisor of oil and gas. “This is unique in the last three or four decades. This is an unusual event, period.”

Though methane, itself, has no odor, the addition of odorants methyl mercaptan and tetrahydrothiophene — a safety measure to alert people by smell to the presence of natural gas — has made the enormous methane seepage impossible to ignore. Thousands of households have evacuated the area, despite little help, much less information, from the gas company about when they might be able to return. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, SoCalGas spokesperson Michael Mizrahi claimed the company had paid to relocate and house 2,092 households — but that effort is severely lacking, says Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer.

Yesterday, the city attorney’s office sought a restraining order to mandate SoCalGas relocate residents in the affected area within 48 hours of their request; and it is also seeking a “special master” to oversee the entire relocation operation, which is currently being handled by the gas company. Not only does the present relocation lack speed and coordination, but a housing crunch has resulted in surrounding areas — in some cases landlords, who prefer year-long leases to shorter terms, have driven rent as high as $8,500 per month. Hotels are operating at capacity, and in “some of those hotel rooms there are not enough beds for the people who are being moved,” explained chief deputy to the city attorney, James P. Clark.

“It’s time Porter Ranch residents had direct and complete answers about all facets of this leak,” Clark continued, “including what caused it, how to stop it, and what will be done to assure it never happens again. They should receive better, quicker, and completely adequate relocation assistance.”

On Thursday, Los Angeles Unified School District board members voted unanimously to close two Porter Ranch schools and relocate their 1,900 students and staff to different locations for the foreseeable future. A local emergency has been declared by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Multiple lawsuits have now been initiated against SoCalGas and/or its parent company, Sempra Energy. A Los Angeles firm representing three of the families, who filed their suit Friday, described in a statement that the well has been “leaking noxious odors, hazardous gases, chemicals, pollutants, and contaminants due to a massive well failure and blowout. However, SoCalGas failed to inform residents of neighboring communities of the disastrous gas leak in a timely manner, putting the health and well-being of thousands of families in jeopardy.” Those suits allege “negligence, strict liability of ultra-hazardous activity, private nuisance, inverse condemnation, and trespass.”

A class-action lawsuit has also been filed on behalf of the Save Porter Ranch group; and City Attorney Mike Feuer filed a civil suit earlier this month due to the leak’s continued threat to residents’ health and damage to the environment, alleging failure by SoCalGas to prevent the leak and further exacerbation of “the effects of that failure by allowing the acute odor and health problems faced by the community to persist for more than one month, to say nothing about the indefinite time it will persist into the future,” state the court documents. “No community should have to endure what the residents of Porter Ranch have suffered from the gas company’s continued failure to stop that leak,” Feuer stated.

SoCalGas insists there will be no long-term health effects resulting from the persistent leak; but as Brockovich pointed out, “no one really knows the potential long-term side effects of benzene and radon, the carcinogens that are commonly found in natural gas.” In an email to the Los Angeles Daily News, SoCalGas stated they were “providing air filters for people’s homes” and “have established a claims process for those who feel they may have suffered harm or injury. And our top priority remains stopping this leak as quickly and safely as possible.

“While the odor added to the leaking gas can cause symptoms for some, the gas is not toxic and county health officials have said the leak does not pose a long-term health risk.”

But what’s making this massive leak so difficult to stop pertains to the storage ‘container,’ itself. “We have the largest natural gas storage system in the world,” boasts Chris McGill, vice president of the American Gas Association. In the United States, old underground oil fields are often put to use as storage vessels for natural gas — because, hey, that geology worked just fine to hold oil for millions of years, so why not natural gas?

In fact, there are some 300 such depleted subterranean oil fields being employed this way around the United States. Aliso Canyon, a natural gas storage site since the 1970s, has one of the largest capacities: 86 billion cubic feet. During the summer, gas earmarked for winter heating is pumped into these underground cavities by SoCalGas — and the process is reversed with the turn of the seasons. However, this year, workers encountered what quickly became evident was anything but a typical hiccup. As Wired reported:

“On October 23, workers noticed the leak at a 40-year-old well in Aliso Canyon. Small leaks are routine, says Bohlen, and SoCalGas did what it routinely does: put fluid down the well to stop the leak and tinker with the well head. It didn’t work. The company tried it five more times, and the gas kept leaking. At this point, it was clear the leak was far from routine, and the problem was deeper underground.”

Beginning December 4th, SoCalGas crews began drilling a relief well to intercept the fissured pipe. Cement will then be poured into both to seal the wells permanently. Of course, for this to work, crews must locate that original pipe, which is a mere seven inches in diameter, thousands of feet underground — without accidentally creating any sparks, whatsoever. Work near the leak site, therefore, has been prohibited after nightfall, when lighting equipment could potentially cause such a spark; though drilling for the relief well is situated far enough away to continue nonstop.

Flaring, or setting a deliberate fire to burn off excess gas, simply isn’t an option. The mammoth scope of this leak means a flare would ultimately complicate matters even further.

“There is no stone being left unturned to get this well closed,” Bohlen stated. “It’s our top priority.”

In the meantime, it will be months without any possibility of halting this disaster-in-motion. Sickened, uprooted, and furious residents can rest assured, though, because even as methane spews nonstop into the air, SoCalGas did have this consolation:

“We are deeply sorry for the frustration.”

Claire Bernish joined Anti-Media as an independent journalist in May of
2015. Her topics of interest include thwarting war propaganda through
education, the refugee crisis & related issues, 1st Amendment
concerns, ending police brutality, and general government &
corporate accountability. Born in North Carolina, she now lives in
Cincinnati, Ohio.

Gas is escaping through a ruptured pipe more than 8,000 feet underground, and "it shows no signs of stopping," according to the California Air Resources Board.

Infographic of leak (and potential solution)

Methane - a greenhouse gas 72 times more impactful in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide - has been escaping from the Aliso Canyon site with force equivalent “to a volcanic eruption” for about two months now.

New infrared footage exposes the massive leak.

As TheAntiMedia.org's Claire Bernish details, methane gas continues spewing, unchecked, into the air over southern California from a fractured well to an underground storage site — at such an alarming rate that low-flying planes have necessarily been diverted by the FAA, lest internal combustion engines meet highly volatile gas and, well, blow the entire area to hell.

This is, indeed, the biggest environmental catastrophe since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; and for now, there is no way to stop it.

This methane disaster is worse than can be sufficiently described in words, because while it’s estimated well over 100,000 pounds of methane spew into the atmosphere every hour, the leak can’t be halted, at least until spring. Even then, that stoppage depends entirely on the efficacy of a proposed fix — which remains a dubiously open question.

According to the California Air Resources Board, methane — a greenhouse gas 72 times more impactful in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide — has been escaping from the Aliso Canyon site with force equivalent “to a volcanic eruption” for about two months now. So far, the total leaked gas measures somewhere around 100,000 tons — adding “approximately one-quarter to the regular statewide methane emissions” during that same time frame.

“The relative magnitude of emissions from the leak compared to other sources of methane in the State underscores the urgency of stopping the gas leak. This comes on top of any problems caused by odor and any potential impacts from exposure,” states the initial report on the Aliso leak by air quality officials.

“The enormity of the Aliso Canyon gas leak cannot be overstated. Gas is escaping through a ruptured pipe more than 8,000 feet underground, and it shows no signs of stopping. As the pressure from the weight on top of the pipe causes the gas to diffuse, it only continues to dissipate across a wider and wider area,”explained Erin Brockovich, who spent time in nearby Porter Ranch investigating the leak.

Officials and experts are concerned, and they can’t recall another leak of this magnitude in decades — if ever. “I asked this question of our staff of 30 years,” said Steve Bohlen, who recently left his position as state supervisor of oil and gas. “This is unique in the last three or four decades. This is an unusual event, period.”

Though methane, itself, has no odor, the addition of odorants methyl mercaptan and tetrahydrothiophene — a safety measure to alert people by smell to the presence of natural gas — has made the enormous methane seepage impossible to ignore. Thousands of households have evacuated the area, despite little help, much less information, from the gas company about when they might be able to return.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, SoCalGas spokesperson Michael Mizrahi claimed the company had paid to relocate and house 2,092 households — but that effort is severely lacking, says Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer.

Yesterday, the city attorney’s office sought a restraining order to mandate SoCalGas relocate residents in the affected area within 48 hours of their request; and it is also seeking a “special master” to oversee the entire relocation operation, which is currently being handled by the gas company. Not only does the present relocation lack speed and coordination, but a housing crunch has resulted in surrounding areas — in some cases landlords, who prefer year-long leases to shorter terms, have driven rent as high as $8,500 per month. Hotels are operating at capacity, and in “some of those hotel rooms there are not enough beds for the people who are being moved,” explained chief deputy to the city attorney, James P. Clark.

“It’s time Porter Ranch residents had direct and complete answers about all facets of this leak,” Clark continued, “including what caused it, how to stop it, and what will be done to assure it never happens again. They should receive better, quicker, and completely adequate relocation assistance.”

On Thursday, Los Angeles Unified School District board members voted unanimously to close two Porter Ranch schools and relocate their 1,900 students and staff to different locations for the foreseeable future. A local emergency has been declared by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Multiple lawsuits have now been initiated against SoCalGas and/or its parent company, Sempra Energy. A Los Angeles firm representing three of the families, who filed their suit Friday, described in a statement that the well has been “leaking noxious odors, hazardous gases, chemicals, pollutants, and contaminants due to a massive well failure and blowout. However, SoCalGas failed to inform residents of neighboring communities of the disastrous gas leak in a timely manner, putting the health and well-being of thousands of families in jeopardy.” Those suits allege “negligence, strict liability of ultra-hazardous activity, private nuisance, inverse condemnation, and trespass.”

A class-action lawsuit has also been filed on behalf of the Save Porter Ranch group; and City Attorney Mike Feuer filed a civil suit earlier this month due to the leak’s continued threat to residents’ health and damage to the environment, alleging failure by SoCalGas to prevent the leak and further exacerbation of “the effects of that failure by allowing the acute odor and health problems faced by the community to persist for more than one month, to say nothing about the indefinite time it will persist into the future,” state the court documents. “No community should have to endure what the residents of Porter Ranch have suffered from the gas company’s continued failure to stop that leak,” Feuer stated.

SoCalGas insists there will be no long-term health effects resulting from the persistent leak; but as Brockovich pointed out, “no one really knows the potential long-term side effects of benzene and radon, the carcinogens that are commonly found in natural gas.” In an email to the Los Angeles Daily News, SoCalGas stated they were “providing air filters for people’s homes” and “have established a claims process for those who feel they may have suffered harm or injury. And our top priority remains stopping this leak as quickly and safely as possible.

“While the odor added to the leaking gas can cause symptoms for some, the gas is not toxic and county health officials have said the leak does not pose a long-term health risk.”

But what’s making this massive leak so difficult to stop pertains to the storage ‘container,’ itself. “We have the largest natural gas storage system in the world,” boasts Chris McGill, vice president of the American Gas Association. In the United States, old underground oil fields are often put to use as storage vessels for natural gas — because, hey, that geology worked just fine to hold oil for millions of years, so why not natural gas?

In fact, there are some 300 such depleted subterranean oil fields being employed this way around the United States. Aliso Canyon, a natural gas storage site since the 1970s, has one of the largest capacities: 86 billion cubic feet. During the summer, gas earmarked for winter heating is pumped into these underground cavities by SoCalGas — and the process is reversed with the turn of the seasons. However, this year, workers encountered what quickly became evident was anything but a typical hiccup. As Wired reported:

“On October 23, workers noticed the leak at a 40-year-old well in Aliso Canyon. Small leaks are routine, says Bohlen, and SoCalGas did what it routinely does: put fluid down the well to stop the leak and tinker with the well head. It didn’t work. The company tried it five more times, and the gas kept leaking. At this point, it was clear the leak was far from routine, and the problem was deeper underground.”

Beginning December 4th, SoCalGas crews began drilling a relief well to intercept the fissured pipe. Cement will then be poured into both to seal the wells permanently. Of course, for this to work, crews must locate that original pipe, which is a mere seven inches in diameter, thousands of feet underground — without accidentally creating any sparks, whatsoever. Work near the leak site, therefore, has been prohibited after nightfall, when lighting equipment could potentially cause such a spark; though drilling for the relief well is situated far enough away to continue nonstop.

Flaring, or setting a deliberate fire to burn off excess gas, simply isn’t an option. The mammoth scope of this leak means a flare would ultimately complicate matters even further.

“There is no stone being left unturned to get this well closed,” Bohlen stated. “It’s our top priority.”

In the meantime, it will be months without any possibility of halting this disaster-in-motion. Sickened, uprooted, and furious residents can rest assured, though, because even as methane spews nonstop into the air, SoCalGas did have this consolation:

Beware ‘Sunni-Stan’: Neocons are Back and Their ‘Vision’ is Darker than Ever

John Bolton is a tarnished character. The once United States Ambassador to the United Nations is now promoted as a ‘scholar’ in the pro-Israel lobby group, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Bolton is not a peacemaker, nor, in his defense, did he ever try to appear as if one. When he was appointed as the US Ambassador to the UN by George W. Bush, his stint lasted for only one year, starting August 2005.

His time in this position was marked with discord and conflict. He stole the limelight with such statements as:

"The (UN) Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.”

When the Iraq war failed to achieve any of its objectives, thus signaling an American retreat in the Middle East, neo-conservative politicians like Bolton retreated to their right-wing, neo-conservative institutions. Those who did not have one, established an organization of their own and began issuing press releases at random, hailing Israel at times, and chastising their President, Barack Obama, for one thing or another.

When the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ took place, neocons, like Bolton, saw in it an opportunity, but one that was difficult to discern. On one hand, they understood little of the mechanisms that propelled popular actions, for they are used to operate at the highest level of power with total disconnect from the people. On the other hand, it was clear for them from the start that Obama was taking no chances by stepping back into a Middle East quagmire that was originally designed by his predecessor.

Unable to affect much change in the region, as they once envisioned under the leadership of the likes of Richard Perle and his Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neocons mounted a strategy predicated mostly on discrediting their administration’s lack of strategy.

In a sense the ‘Arab Spring’ invigorated the neocons, but also reminded them of their political impotence. Gone were the days of concocting foreign policies from neo-conservative think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), of which, among others, Perle is an active member.

In fact, Perle is quite a cherished member of the American Enterprise Institute, where Bolton often mounts his occasional articles in mainstream US media, offering a ‘vision’ regarding how to take on Iran, how to reform Arab states and how to redraw the map of the Middle East in ways that are conducive to US foreign policy interests.

The latest of such intellectual charges by Bolton was published in the New York Times on November 24. Under the title, “To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State,” he theorized once more, raging against "Obama's ineffective efforts" to destroy ISIS and demanding, instead, a “clear view shared by NATO allies." The main drive behind his logic is that once ISIS is destroyed, the region that the militant group designated as a 'state' should be turned into a Sunni state, which, as a working title he called "Sunni-Stan."

Bolton’s reasoning is as predictable as it is arrogant. It is predictable in the sense that, like other neocon initiatives in the past, it has no respect for the wishes of the people of the Middle East. His arguments are constructed upon the same world view that sees conflict as an opportunity, and warring nations as pawns in a larger game, aimed at subduing people to achieve ‘security’ and ‘stability’ for the US and its supposed allies.

It is also arrogant for the obvious reason that he believes the world should be designed to fit the narrow, self-serving and often violent visions of failed politicians like himself, who, alas, has access to the US’s most respected newspapers.

Bolton’s conceit has completely blinded him to the failures of the Bush administration and the entire collapse of the neo-conservative’s intellectual discourse during, and following the Iraq war. On the contrary, he is asking to repeat exactly what went wrong in Iraq.

“As we did in Iraq with the 2006 ‘Anbar Awakening,’ the counter-insurgency operation that dislodged Al Qaeda from its stronghold in that Iraqi province, we and our allies must empower viable Sunni leaders, including tribal authorities, who prize their existing social structure,” he wrote.

Only an unreasonable person cannot appreciate how the sectarian seed that the US has sowed in Iraq, based on the recommendations of the likes of Bolton, has resulted in the disfiguring of the Iraqi nation. This massive tampering with the social, cultural, religious and political fabric of society – by first empowering the Shia, oppressing the Sunni, then turning the Sunnis against one another, and so forth – has paved the way for unity among various Sunni groups, which ultimately formed ISIS.

It is the grand experimentations of Bolton and his peers that made ISIS the ‘state’ that it is today, which he is proposing to replace with yet another sectarian state, thus slicing up two Arab countries that were once the seats of the two most prominent Caliphate civilizations in history, the Abbasid and the Umayyad.

But for what purpose and at what price? If meddling at a relatively small scale has turned the Middle East into a perpetual inferno, and roped in regional and international rivals into a war that seems to be in constant expansion, one can only imagine what such a large scale reconfiguration of the region could lead to; and for what? So that Bolton can ensure the complete dismantling of the region in favor of Israel and that a buffer state can be established to block the Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon? So that his country could gain access to more oil supplies? So that Russia’s attempt at having a stake in the future Middle East would be thwarted?

Whatever it is, the neo-conservatives should never be allowed access to the Middle East discourse, and their visions, those of doom and destruction, should remain confined to their ever mushrooming think tanks.

True, it is the perpetual war and horrific rivalries in the Middle East that have finally empowered the neocons to stage a comeback; but considering the damage that these groups have already done, one is certain that no good can possibly come from Bolton and his clique.

– Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Flowers From Guantanamo

December 21, 2015

Kabul - Here in Kabul, young friends with the Afghan Peace Volunteers look forward to learning more about “The Tea Project” in late December, when Aaron Hughes arrives, an artist, a U.S. military veteran, and a core member of Iraq Veterans Against War. He’ll carry with him 20 plaster replicas of a standard-issue, factory-made Styrofoam cup. They’re part of a set numbering 779 replica cups, each cup dedicated to prisoners detained in Guantanamo. In the entire collection, 220 of the cups bear names of Afghan citizens imprisoned in Guantanamo.

In Guantanamo, with each evening meal, Guantanamo prisoners are served tea in styrofoam cups. Many prisoners etch floral designs into their cups, which become a nightly artistic outlet for men with few other freedoms allowed them. Aaron had heard a former Guantanamo guard describe how deeply he grew to love the cups that had become works of art.

The cups would then be collected, each night, and turned over to military intelligence which most likely just dumped them. Aaron’s cups are more durable. A Guantanamo prisoner’s name is written on the base of every cup, and each carries a unique design. Following the practice of the prisoners, Aaron focused on etching floral patterns into the cups he created, displaying flowers that are native to each prisoner’s homeland. 220 of the cups he has sculpted bear the names of prisoners from Afghanistan.

Life stories represented by each cup are reaching a wide variety of individuals and groups during Aaron’s travels on behalf of the project. He invites people to sit with him, sip tea from the cups, and talk about their stories related to war, destruction, peace, love, creativity …the conversations range freely, but the cups bring a certain focus, remembering the prisoners in Guantanamo.

I wish that Aaron could somehow sit across from Tariq Ba Odah and serve him tea. Now 36 years old, Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni citizen, arrived in Guantanamo in 2002, when he was only 23. Detained without charge in Guantanamo since 2002, Tariq has maintained a hunger strike since 2007. He now weighs 74 pounds. His lawyers say that he visibly suffers from severe effects of malnutrition and is at serious risk of permanent physical and neurological impairment and death. Tariq Ba Odah endures horrible force feeding rather than cooperate with the system that has separated him and the other prisoners from loved ones, subjecting them to torture and dehumanizing conditions.

Witness Against Torture activists from the U.S. focused on Tariq Ba Odah’s life in Guantanamo when they set up their encampment, in late November, 2015, in Cuba, outside the U.S. naval base. Like Aaron, they feel great empathy for the people imprisoned in Guantanamo, along with responsibility to keep educating U.S. people about the plight of 47 prisoners still held there.

The delegation demanded that the prison close. They reject a new plan being developed by the Obama administration which would move the Guantanamo prisoners to prisons in the U.S., some still to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

“That would mean holding on to the barbaric practice of indefinite detention. Besides, the entire domestic system of “correctional’ institutions is a travesty, poisoned by racism. We need to overhaul the U.S. justice system, not add Guantanamo to it.”

Enmanuel Candelario, an artist from New York, spoke bluntly about the base itself, calling it “an unwelcome symbol of U.S. power, which houses a torture chamber.”

We can’t directly nourish Tariq Ba Odah or bring him the consolation and affection for which he must also be starving. But together we can invite people to slow down and think about their actual circumstances and relationships with supposed enemies. We can help dismantle the terrible Islamophobia and fear that keeps many people in the U.S. imprisoned in the reckless grip of war makers.

When Aaron arrives in the Afghan Peace Volunteer community, he will sit with the young volunteers as well as the child laborers who are part of the Borderfree Street Kids School. He’ll also connect with local artists. While here, he hopes to serve tea and converse with people in a variety of places.

The conversations will very likely stir up questions about the 220 Afghans who were imprisoned in Guantanamo, as well as Afghans detained in the ‘Afghan Guantanamo’, Bagram Prison. I asked friends in our community here what kinds of questions they hope might be raised. Here are two responses: “Prisoners of the U.S. military – are they people who can create and enjoy art?” “Do they love?”

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Spain has Fallen – not like Greece – but Fallen all the Same

The Spanish elections – 20 December – were a deceit and a farce. Nobody seems to notice. At least not those concerned, the ignorant electorate, those who will suffer again possibly under a new neoliberal Rajoy leadership.

People forget and are vulnerable to propaganda and lies and manipulations through the bought media in Europe as much as in the US. And this in Spain of all places, where unemployment is still hovering around the 20% – 25% mark, with youth unemployment around 50%, and where an average grad student coming out of university earns on average 1,000 euros or less per month, if he can find a job; hardly a livable wage.

Others have to survive on monthly incomes in the 500 to 800 euro range.

Spain, a country like Greece, where neoliberal troika policies cut minimum wages, pensions, increased retirement age, privatized the health system – and are at the verge of privatizing education. Spain, a country where the ruling Partido Popular (PP) was and still is involved in horrendous corruption scandals all the way to the top, as was widely divulged earlier this year even by the mainstream media. Does it not seem absurd that in this miserably down-trodden Spain, the largest single block of people are no more awake than voting again for their hangman?

Maybe they are awake, but stunned of the results and are too tired from working for peanuts than ‘wasting’ their scarce spare-time to investigate election results, analysing how elections could have turned out the way they did: The arch-conservative neoliberal PP winning a majority of parliamentary seats – 123 (28.7% of votes), though a far cry from the absolute majority (176) and a drop of 64 seats from 2011; the PSOE (Socialist Party) coming in with 22% and 90 seats (down 20), its worst result ever; the up-and-coming PODEMOS – gaining 69 seats (20.7%); and the new center-right Ciudadanos Party winning 40 seats (13.9%), the latter two from basically zero in 2011.

Forming a new Government with these fractured election results will not be easy. While the new Congress is normally responsible for choosing the new Prime Minister, in the present divided Spain it is likely that King Felipe will have to intervene, negotiating with the leading parties to propose a candidate that suits them all. This process starts officially on 13 January 2016, when the new deputies are sworn in and the speaker is selected. If the Monarch’s suggested candidate doesn’t get an absolute majority in the first round, there will be a second round of voting 48 hours later, where the proposed candidate must only receive a majority of the cast votes. Failing this, new elections will have to be called within two months. This would be a first in Spain’s history. The socialists have already said they would not support the incumbent, Mariano Rajoy. But will they stick to their promise?

The 2015 Spanish elections beg two questions:

First, how come that in the traditional two-party system, suddenly four parties emerge, three of which of almost equal strength, PP, PSOE and Podemos, and the fourth, Ciudadanos rapidly growing. Together they accumulate 322 of the 350 seats, or 85.3%. The two new ones, Podemos and Ciudadanos (also called C’s) grew from basically nothing in March 2014, some 18 month ago, to take a total of 109 parliamentary seats, almost one third of all seats. That is unheard of anywhere in the western world. This coincides with the time when in Greece Syriza started making headways.

Second, how come that in a country where 80% to 90% of the population suffered misery and social hardship from the neoliberal PP-imposed austerity programs – still vote with a considerable majority for the party that punished them? Is this the Stockholm syndrome, or what? – Is there perhaps something else behind it?

Spain was ruled by fascist General Francisco Franco for 39 years, from 1936 to his death in 1975. Out of the Civil War (1936-1939) grew an authoritarian, nationalistic fascist party, the Falangistas. They became Franco’s official ruling party in 1939. The Falangistas were instrumental in commandeering death squads and ‘disappearances’.

After WWII Spain was internationally considered a pariah state due to her fascist and oppressive government and was kept out of the UN, the Marshall Plan and NATO. Nevertheless, in 1953 Washington tempted by the peninsula’s strategic situation entered into an alliance with Franco by signing the Pact of Madrid. It was a calculated step for the US to establish military bases which guaranteed America’s support for the dictator – who was also a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union. Spain was admitted to the UN in 1955 and eventually seven years after Franco’s deaths, in 1982, Spain became the 15th NATO member.

During Franco’s reign, the Falangistas solidified as a dictatorial fascist party. After Franco’s death, the party did not disintegrate; to the contrary, to this day it remains very influential with close ties to the Catholic Church. With this semi-clandestine right-wing political scenario alive and well, wouldn’t it have been relatively simple for Washington to pull the strings and creating a multi-party divided Spain, easier to manipulate and to control? Another form of divide and conquer. US global interests wanted to avoid the risk of another Greece, where the left would come to power and would need to be smashed as did happen with Syriza under the command of Anglo-Zionist Washington – implemented by the troika (European Central Bank, European Commission and IMF).

Had it not been for most likely criminal threats to the lead-politicians of Syriza, Greece was at the point – and still is – of disintegrating and exiting the euro – and possibly also leaving the EU – the European non-Union. Another ‘Greece’, as Spain could have become, might have prompted not just a ‘Spaxit’, but most probably the collapse of the EU altogether. That would have been an unforgiveable and probably unrepairable disaster for the Unite States which needs Europe as its puppet union of states directed by Washington lackeys in Brussels, for trade and manipulating markets, as a monetary stability base and for highly qualified cheap labor; and – maybe most importantly – as a vital buffer vis-à-vis Russia and the emerging eastern alliance with China – the BRICS and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) states.

For those still in doubt – the Unite States of America were the initiators and creators of the European Union, carefully planned, step by step, from the Brussels Treaty after WWII in 1948, to the Paris Treaty 1951/52, to the Modified Brussels Treaty 1954/55, to the Treaty of Rome 1957/58, and eventually to the Merger of Treaties in 1965/67 forming the three pillars of the European Community (European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), European Economic Community – EEC); leading to the Maastricht Treaty of 1991/92 – the foundation of the European Union, enhanced and modified by the Amsterdam Treaty, 1997/99; followed by the Nice Treaty, 2001/2003; and finally the 2007/2009 Lisbon Treaty, currently in force.

You may notice the European Union has no Constitution; and none of the various Treaties foresees a political European Union, one that would have solidarity of federal nations as a fundamental basis. A 2004 attempt to establish an EU Constitution was immediately boycotted by the UK as a proxy for Washington, so as to have subsequent popular votes in France and the Netherlands fail.

A Union of nations without a common political agenda and goal cannot have a sustainable common currency. That’s where the thought process may have failed. The Euro may sooner or later be doomed to collapse and so may be the European Union; the sooner the better. The prompting of the process of dissolving this fake union, of breaking loose of the nefarious fangs of Washington and NATO, will be a sign of the European populations’ awakening and wisdom.

Reflecting on the Spanish elections of 20 December 2015, putting them into context with never ending austerity imposed by the rich on the poor, resulting in a never ending economic ‘crisis’ – leading to ever richer banks and an ever richer Anglo-European elite — may hopefully be a trigger for action.

This act clearly violates article 53 from Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that:

“Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State...is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”

However, according to WAFA correspondence, Israeli soldiers and settlers claimed the land located near 60 Street until Ma'ale Levona was incorporated as a settlement, while Palestinians are now prohibited from cultivating these lands.

This Week on GR

As we've done in years past so we will again today do; to wit, take a look at where we are this festive time of year, counting our blessings, while wishing the best for those around us, and too forgetting the slights we've suffered, unburdening ourselves the weight of animosities carried throughout the year to live finally life joyous as it is intended to be.

This year we'll be joined by: Ini Kamoze, James Carroll, Gil Scott-Heron, Transglobal Underground, Hawksley Workman, Brian Ferry, the Pogues, Sarah Simpson, and maybe even a surprise or two.

The Syrian Opposition Circus Comes to Town

In January, the Syrian government will – ostensibly - sit across the negotiating table from ‘the Syrian opposition’ to decide on the structure and make-up of a transitional government that promises to end the 5-year Syrian conflict.

The ‘Syrian opposition,’ we are told by US Secretary of State John Kerry, will be selected by ‘Syrians’ and will therefore be ‘representative.’

Kerry addresses press at UN on Syria (Dec. 18, 2015)

“This is not about imposing anything on anyone,” Kerry remarked about the Vienna process, convened to broker a Syrian peace – which was negotiated by 20 countries, but without the involvement of Syrians.

“I want to be clear: the Syrian people will be the validators of this whole effort,” says Kerry again – lest we forget.

This is just before he instructs us that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad cannot hold any long-term position in Syria:

“Asking the opposition to trust Assad or to accept Assad’s leadership is simply not a reasonable request, and it is literally therefore a non-starter,” explains Kerry from his non-Syrian perspective.

Incidentally, Kerry now also calls any Syrian demand for Assad to leave before the political transition “a non-starting position.” It appears that to be part of this ‘Syrian solution,’ you must first agree with Kerry’s many nuanced positions on Syria.

But back to the ‘Syrian opposition’ – those able negotiators who will represent the ‘Syrian people’ come January.

This is where it gets really confusing. The 20 non-Syrian countries participating in the Vienna process will ultimately decide 1. which Syrians will speak for the opposition at future talks, and 2. which Syrians will instead be labelled ‘terrorists’ to be slaughtered on the battlefield.

To whittle down the ‘Syrian opposition’ to a few dozen individuals that are ‘representative’ of Syrians, several meetings were held to fight it out - mostly in foreign countries.

The Saudis shrewdly tried to grab front-runner advantage for their favorite Syrians by hosting a highly-publicized meeting in Riyadh that cobbled together a 34-member opposition ‘turnkey solution.’

But several countries balked at some of the Riyadh-cooked opposition, which consists of groups or individuals they think should be on the ‘terrorist’ list instead of the negotiating table.

Others on the Saudi shortlist don’t appear to be ‘representative’ of anybody, let alone the ‘Syrian people.’ They include several former heads of the now widely-discredited Syrian National Coalition (SNC), once viewed by Syria’s foes as the country’s ‘legitimate’ government-in-exile.

These Riyadh-backed luminaries include ex-SNC President George Sabra, who gained his Syrian ‘legitimacy’ in 2012 from a whopping 28 votes cast by 41 Syrians - in Qatar.

They also include Khaled Khoja, who squeaked through as president of the now-rebranded ‘National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’ with 56 votes out of 109 cast - in Turkey.

They also include the likes of Saudi-based Ahmad Jarba, who won his second term at the helm of the National Council in 2014 with 65 votes – also cast in Turkey. Jarba beat his only rival Riad Hijab by 13 whole votes. Hijab turned the tables on Jarba in Riyadh last week, however, when 34 Syrians chose him instead to represent them at peace talks in Vienna.

Hijab, of course, is best known as the highest-ranking official to defect from the Syrian government during this crisis. He was prime minister of the country at the time - and I was in Damascus sitting in a roadside café when the news of his defection first broke. It created quite a stir in the café: Half of the Syrian customers were asking “who is the prime minister?” while the other half were asking “who is Riad Hijab?”

Representative of the Syrian people? Not so much.

The ‘Terrorists’

There are two lists being drawn up per the agreement reached in Vienna: the first list is to decide the ‘Syrian opposition’ negotiators. Since 22 million Syrians will not be voting for their own representatives, this list will basically be ‘manufactured’ by a handful of influential foreign states via some frenzied horse-trading.

The second list created by the Vienna-20 will determine which Syrian opposition militias are to be designated as ‘terrorist’ organizations. It is understood that those who make this list will not be participating in any ceasefires. It is also understood that the groups on this list will be mowed down by the Syrian army, its allies and foreign coalition airstrikes – unless they flee back across the Turkish border, of course.

For years, Washington has insisted there are armed ‘moderate’ groups in Syria, but have gone to great lengths to avoid naming these ‘moderates.’ Why? Because if moderates were named and identified, the US would have to be very, very certain that no past, present or future ‘atrocity video’ would surface to prove otherwise. And the US could not guarantee this with any of the groups they have armed, trained or financed in Syria over the past five years.

The twenty countries involved in Vienna talks have already agreed that ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise) are on this list. The big question now is who else makes the cut. And in everyone’s sights first and foremost is Ahrar al Sham, a Turkish, Qatari and Saudi-funded extremist group whose backbone is a mix of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.

Earlier last summer, when I queried the US State Department about how they viewed Ahrar, I was told:

“The US has neither worked with nor provided any assistance to Ahrar al-Sham. The US supports moderate Syrian opposition groups."

Put it this way, if Ahrar were ‘moderates,’ they would have already received direct US assistance, so desperate has Washington been to find Syrian fighters to do their bidding. And influential Americans have worked overtime to whitewash Ahrar - to distance it from Al Qaeda and other extremists, even though Ahrar’s closest primary ground force ally is none other than Jabhat al Nusra.

This strange western-Turkish-GCC determination to mainstream radical Salafist militants was seen again in Riyadh in December, when Ahrar reps were invited to join the opposition deliberations. The group is reported to have signed on to the final Riyadh declaration, but this was later hotly disputed by its leadership inside Syria. Either way, Ahrar is never going to be comfortable with Vienna’s terms today – to do so will be to turn its guns on its comrades in Nusra tomorrow, and to renounce many of its core beliefs.

The Ahrar challenge is mirrored by many of the hundreds of militias fighting inside Syria right now. These are mostly Sunni Islamist fighters, who over the course of this conflict have become overtly sectarian, violent and intolerant. Are they terrorists? The Syrian state says yes, and so do its allies Iran and Russia.

And this leads us to why they are right.

Armed and foreign-backed

Whatever this Syrian crisis has been, a ‘revolution’ it is not. No revolution, borne from the heart of a genuinely popular insurrection, is financed, armed and trained by the enemies of a state. What has transpired in Syria for the past five years is a long-planned foreign conspiracy – in coordination with a small sliver of its nationals - to create regime-change on the back of the narratives of the ‘Arab Spring.’

The US military’s ‘unconventional warfare’ manual contains the blueprint for exactly this kind of regime-change operation:

But this is not the first time this trick has been tried in Syria. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood launched a similar operation from inside Hama and tried to replicate it nationwide. They failed and were wiped out by Bashar al Assad’s father, Hafez, who was not constrained by the threat of today’s foreign “humanitarian intervention” and “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P) doctrines.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in their now-declassified 1982 report on Hama called the Muslim Brotherhood’s actions “terrorism,” and rightly so.

You cannot pick up arms against a central government, impose your will with weapons on population centers, blow up police stations, public transportation, bread factories, pipelines, waterworks, target your national army, human-shield yourself in mosques and schools, assassinate public and private figures – and imagine yourself anything but a terrorist. You are not fighting an occupation, where your right to self-defense is enshrined in law. You are fighting your state, and your state has an internationally-mandated legal duty to protect its nationals – from you.

Furthermore, no state would shelter you from lawful consequence if you were doing all these things at the behest of, and with material support from, an enemy state.

Syria’s largest militant opposition groups are - one and all - financed, armed, trained, supported by the United States, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, France and a smattering of other states and nationals.

None of these groups belong at a negotiating table across from the Syrian government – for one, they do not represent ‘Syrians,’ they represent foreign interests.

Can Washington name a single of its own anti-government, US-based, armed militias that it would term “moderate?” If an enemy state was financing and arming a group of American citizens, what would the consequence be if this group burned vehicles, killed police officers, set banks ablaze?

Moderate or extremist, secular or Islamist, why should Syria’s foreign-backed armed groups sit at the table in Vienna? And, for that matter, why should Syria’s foreign-backed unarmed politicos represent ‘Syrians’ at talks either?

Foreign states that spent five years ignoring the many non-violent Syrian dissidents based in Syria who have spent decades in opposition - in order to manufacture a thoroughly unrepresentative, subservient, malleable and repressive ‘Syrian opposition’ that will serve their interests – should not be rewarded for their deeds in Vienna.

None of their hand-picked ‘Syrian opposition’ will do – these mini-tyrants, warlords and militants will just prolong Syria’s tragedy indefinitely.

Think of Vienna as a stage. Right now, several western powers are seeking a political solution in Vienna as an exit from the Syrian theater - because it has become too costly. The extremism of ISIS, terror threats on the home front, a flood of migrants and refugees, and the promise of indefinite chaos in the Middle East has created a new-found bargaining spirit in the west. For the west, Assad, the Russians and Iranians suddenly look like worthy partners today – able, potentially, to help negotiate a face-saving exit from the Syrian quagmire. It is no coincidence that the US pushed through a nuclear deal with Iran this year – or that Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are co-chairing the Vienna talks.

But in the east – in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar – Vienna represents potential defeat unless Assad goes. These states either believe they are facing down existential threats, or at best, political humiliations from which they are unlikely to recover.

This brings another level of complexity to the Vienna stage. Allies in east and west find themselves with vastly diverging interests. All are still looking to stack their hands with cards which can improve their fortunes at the table, but their militants in the Syrian field have been losing ground since Russian jets took to Syria’s skies. Their own anti-terror Coalition is being outed and shamed for its complicity with the very terrorists it purports to fight. And they still, five years on, cannot construct a cohesive ‘Syrian opposition.’

Vienna is unlikely to ever see a genuine Syrian political solution. But it could still act as a springboard for some new thinking. Think ‘terror’ first. Disarm militants, halt weapons transfers, shut down borders, besiege them in their strongholds, cut off their financing, sanction their supporters.

Many of these components were in last week’s UN Security Council Resolution 2254, co-sponsored by Syria, in a new twist. An important start.

Finally, acknowledge the reforms that the state tried to implement in the first few months of the Syrian crisis – Syria shut down its military court at the same time that Jordan was establishing a new security court. Why was one derided and the other lauded? Provide the time and space – reconciliation takes time - for Syrians to gear up for new elections under international observation.

If a ‘Syrian opposition’ is the desired outcome, this can only come organically from inside Syria, when Syrians are no longer under the threat of violent conflict.

The alternative, of course, is this Syrian opposition circus that is gearing up for a fall in Vienna. You can pay these clowns through the nose, but you will never get a performance out of them.

Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East
geopolitics. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony's College,
Oxford University and has a master’s degree in International Relations
from Columbia University. Sharmine has written commentary for a wide
array of publications, including Al Akhbar English, the New York Times,
the Guardian, Asia Times Online, Salon.com, USA Today, the Huffington
Post, Al Jazeera English, BRICS Post and others. You can follow her on
Twitter at @snarwani

The Digital Dark Ages: Movies and Books Get Deleted as Selfies Pile Up

The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years.

But don’t blame the Visigoths or the Vandals.

The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen big 8” floppies replaced by 5.25” medium replaced by little 3.5” floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud — and let’s not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.

We’ll ignore the data lost in computer crashes.

Each transition has seen the loss of countless zillions of documents and images. The irony is that, even as we’re generating more records than any civilization ever, we’re destroying so much important stuff that future generations will hardly know we ever lived.

Google Vice President Vint Cerf recently mused about Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln: “Such a book might not be possible to write about the people living today … the digital content such as emails that an author might need will have evaporated because nobody saved it, or it’s around but it’s not interpretable because it was created by software that’s 100 years old.”

I got to thinking about our civilizational priorities the other day, while managing the photos on my iPhone.

Few of us realize it, but the default settings of electronic devices like a smartphone is to keep, rather than erase. Take a photo or video, and Apple wants to send it and save it to all the gadgets on your Apple Store account. If you’re like me (and in this respect, most people are), you take lot more photos than you delete. But even your “deleted” stuff isn’t really deleted — it’s merely moved to a “Deleted Photos” folder.

And it lives in the Cloud, like, forever. To really really delete something, you have to double-triple-delete it. Most people don’t bother. So all those mundane iPhone photos — countless pics of your kid at the school concert, boarding passes, the image of the wine you mean to get more of — accumulates.

Partly due to my failure to edit crap like that, some experts foresee a looming data capacity crisis of epic proportions.

Keeping everything is a phenomenon of the digital age. Analog photos were expensive to develop and print. So we took fewer of them. And we didn’t develop them all.

More irony: Even as we’re keeping triplicates of, let’s face it, zillions of documents and images we will never, ever look at again, digitalization is erasing cultural works of epic importance en masse.

Of the 80,000 to 90,000 films considered to be in print on DVD in the United States, only a small fraction have made the leap to streaming. For the most part, this is because companies like Netflix can’t or don’t want to buy the rights for movies whose copyright holders want to get real money. The result is, if you want to see such classics as “The Bicycle Thief” or “Marathon Man,” your only hope is to buy an old used DVD on eBay (assuming you still have a DVD player). Of course, each change of format has left films, many of them important, unavailable to cinephiles. Many great films never made it from VHS to DVD.

Format transitions are also murdering our musical and literary legacies.

When I peruse music streaming services like Apple Music, I’m surprised how many albums by my favorite bands available: sorry, Lords of the New Church. This isn’t new: music geeks hunt down rare 78s for old-timey music that never made it to 33-rpm record. Tons of tunes got lost in the move from vinyl to CD. Maybe it’s the stuff that I like to listen to, but it feels like format loss has been more devastating this time around, as music storage goes from physical to ethereal.

It’s easy to forget how many books aren’t making the jump, especially when corporations sell products like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which lets you read any of 600,000 titles for a fee. Many titles, including some by big-name authors like Philip Roth and John Updike, aren’t there.

In case you were wondering, there were 129 million books in the world as of 2010.

Subscribe to Kindle “Unlimited,” then, and you’ve got access to less than 0.5% of the world’s books. But don’t worry, you’ll always have those photos of the school play.

Until you get a new phone.

Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower.

Family Suffocates After Israeli Fanatics Hurled Gas Bombs Into Their Home

A group of fanatic Israeli colonizers hurled, on Tuesday at dawn, several gas bombs into a Palestinian home, in Beitello village, west of the central West Bank city of Ramallah, causing the family to suffocate.

Maan Images

The Israeli assailants broke the glass of a window, and threw the gas bombs inside the property, as the family slept, causing them, including an infant, to suffer severe effects of tear gas inhalation.

The fanatics also wrote racist graffiti on the exterior walls of the Palestinian property, including “revenge,” and “greetings from Zion,” referring to the Israeli terrorists who burnt the Dawabsha family to death, in Douma village, south of the northern West Bank district of Nablus.

Israeli soldiers and police officers arrived at the scene, photographed the attacked home, and the racist graffiti, and prevented the Palestinians from reaching the property.

The terrorist attack that targeted the Dawabsha family led to the immediate death of Ali Dawabsha (18-months), while the father, Sa'ad, succumbed to wounds a week after, and the mother, Reham died one month later. Only Ahmad Dawabsha (4) survived the attack, and is still recovering from severe burns.

by IMEMC and Agencies

December 22, 2015

Israeli Navy ships attacked, Tuesday, several Palestinian fishing boats, close to the Gaza City shore, opened fire on them, before kidnapping ten fishers, and confiscated their boats. In another incident, a woman was injured by army fire in Khan Younis.

File photo - PalTimes

Eyewitnesses said the fishers were in the Sudaniyya Sea area, northwest of Gaza City, when the navy fired several live rounds on them and their boats, and kidnapped ten of them.

On Monday at night, Israeli navy ships attacked several Palestinian fishing boats, in the Beit Lahia sea area, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, and kidnapped four fishers.

On Tuesday at noon, the soldiers, stationed on military towers across the border fence, opened fire on Palestinian farmers, east of Khuza’a town, east of Khan Younis in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, wounding one woman, while working in her land.

Medical sources said the woman wounded in Khan Younis was moved to a local hospital, suffering a moderate injury.

Kids’ Questions on a Lockdown Planet: Thinking the Parentally Unthinkable

"What did you do at school today, Seamus?" It’s a question I ask him everyday.

"Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill today."

And that’s about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling. Sometimes I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi" (Jeremy) pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious three year old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he and his classmates had in their first month of school.

At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a fuller picture of this episode from his teacher.

When the lockdown began, she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the library.

Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet. Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.

"Does he talk about it at home?" she asks.

"It’s as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He talks about lockdown drills all the time."

Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, "Are They Going to Kill Me?"

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: With this post, TomDispatch ends 2015. We’ll be back early in the New Year! In the meantime, let me just remind those of you who are regulars at this website that there are still some days to go in this truly bizarre year. Should the holiday giving mood hit you, don’t forget to visit our donation page, check out the signed, personalized books available to anyone who gives $100 (or more), and help us get through 2016. Again, a deep bow of thanks to all of you who already answered our year-end appeal for contributions in such a spirit of generosity! See you soon. Here’s hoping for a few pleasing surprises from 2016. Happy New Year! Tom]

Fear? Tell me about it. Unfortunately, I’m so old that I’m not sure I really remember what I felt when, along with millions of other schoolchildren of the 1950s, I ducked and covered like Bert the Turtle, huddling under my desk while sirens howled outside the classroom window. We were, of course, being prepared to protect ourselves from the nuclear obliteration of New York City. But let me tell you, I do remember those desks and they did not exactly instill a sense of confidence in a child.

Don’t by the way think that, from personal fallout shelters to fashion tips for the apocalypse, adults weren’t subjected to similar visions of “safety” so hollow as to inspire fear. A government-sponsored civil defense manual of that moment, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, was typical enough in suggesting that men, in danger of being “caught outdoors in a sudden attack,” should wear wide-brimmed fedoras, which would give them “at least some protection from the ‘heat flash’” of a nuclear explosion. For women, as Paul Boyer pointed out in By the Bomb’s Early Light, his classic book on post-Hiroshima nuclear fallout in American society, “stockings and long-sleeved dresses” were de rigueur for a nuclear event.

No kidding. That really was the prosaic 1950s version of the end of everything. I can hardly believe I lived through such an era of half-expressed, yet genuinely horrific fears, no less that from my school years into adulthood I had recurring nightmares filled with mushroom clouds and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes, or that I plunged with relish into the era's pulp science fiction filled with survivor colonies and mutants galore. In the style of parenting of that moment, most children, I suspect, were left on their own to struggle with the prospective obliteration of all life on planet Earth. I still remember how shocking and yet eerily familiar it seemed when, on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy addressed the American people, essentially informing us that we might be at the edge of oblivion in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. For many of us -- I was then just starting college -- it seemed as if the secular equivalent of prophesy was finally coming true and that we would all momentarily be toast.

In those years, I can’t remember a single conversation with my parents about the nuclear drills at school (even though they obviously heard the same sirens), or for that matter about nuclear war. (My best friend, then and now, assures me that his experience was no different.) We lived, my parents and I, in silence through the early years of what might be called the first age of the apocalypse, that moment when the power to destroy all life had fallen from the hands of the gods into distinctly human ones. We still live in such an age.

TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan, far younger than I, had quite a different childhood, as well as parents who couldn’t have answered her nuclear questions more bluntly or graphically, as she explains in this website’s last post of the year. The results, it seems, were no less scary or unnerving than the silence that lay at the heart of what, in my life, could truly be called the “nuclear” family.

I took my own path to Hiroshima and into parenthood as well, and so into the eternally knotty problem of how to talk (or not talk) to your children about the primal fears of our distinctly apocalyptic age. Up to a certain moment, your kids have a kind of blind faith in your ability to know, a faith that -- as I experienced many times and Berrigan describes today -- can tie you in knots of authoritative lunacy on subjects about which you know next to nothing or about which you are at least as unnerved as they are. How to sort out such a world, whether for your own children, yourself, or the rest of us is, of course, the question and the conundrum for 2016 and beyond. Tom

Kids’ Questions on a Lockdown Planet:

Thinking the Parentally Unthinkable

by Frida Berrigan

She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus remains easily startled long after they’re over, running for shelter between an adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.

At that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I just couldn’t square my son’s loving exuberance and confidence in the people around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by an armed killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all, do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject that’s been on my mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine, so proud to share his classroom with them.

"At home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control, Not Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add, "It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldn’t have to practice surviving a mass killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.

Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!

His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.

"No, no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher learns. "It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to practice for this kind of thing."

Thinking the Unthinkable

I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not quite irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents' generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck and cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.

I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of friends and fellow travelers.

We would stand in front of the Pentagon -- this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with slogans like "You can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to be safe was to get rid of them.

Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared, while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamus’s generation? And what about our present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century whys?

Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are), that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to cling to this "God-given, constitutionally enshrined right," my son does need to endure more lockdown drills.

The consensus of school security experts is certainly that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn't been practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14, 2012.

But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to me? When it makes no sense, period?

Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question. My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved me in a UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly, largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.

My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always ask, "Why no TV?" and always get the same answer. “Because it teaches racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants, because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity.”

So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black and white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room wall. I couldn’t tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists. Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.

I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want to pass on to the next generation. I guess I’m happy that they don’t know what nuclear weapons are (yet) and it’s one more thing I’m not looking forward to explaining to them.

The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are only going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as best we -- I -- can. It’s a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of this world of ours, and it’s a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain the hard stuff? But if we don’t, others surely will. In these early years, our kids turn to us first, but if we can’t or won’t answer their questions, how long will they keep asking them?

Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?

“Why Do the Police Kill People?”

At some preschools, it’s protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?

Somehow, and I can’t tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.

In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code over granola and yogurt. It’s as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.

Still, it’s strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantánamo and climate change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).

After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a three year old and how the very things that we encouraged in him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.

And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I’m sure we’ll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police officer.

And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn’t think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, “Because it’s nuts! And we’re nuts!” I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"

And then, of course, there’s the anxiety I have about how he’ll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom -- the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.

My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened. For five and six year olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation, nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didn’t get enough information to formulate a why.

Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No news, sit tight, and pretend nothing’s going on. After all, like so many of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don’t exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically under attack, yes?

Unlike so many people on this planet, we don’t live in a war zone (if you put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car any day of the week, right?

Of course, there’s another problem lurking here and it’s mine. I’m not there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and I’m not there to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are preparing him for. They couldn’t be creepier. They’re a reminder not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

Some Questions Are Easier Than Others

Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever, because they get sick and their bodies get old and their organs don't work any more and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.

The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best we can in this truly confusing world.

And keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as well, largely unanswered.

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Pony up and make the monkey smile. We don't accept corporate sponsorship, but welcome support of all sizes from the "little people". Because no-one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Special thanks to Ernie Y. for making the chimp grin!